Showing Off the Guts of the Thing

Here’s a little something that isn’t gossip, it isn’t news, it isn’t dramatic or gasp-worthy in any way. It’s just interesting. And we need that sometimes, don’t we? It’s Nearfield.org’s Touch blog going over an abbreviated, visual history of the dashed line, as in the method of showing various layers of a solid object while maintaining its dimensions. It’s really interesting, just to take it all in, and you’ll find yourself getting really into the images. Here’s from the opening:

In previous work I have advocated for the use of dashed lines, my paper for Mobile HCI 2006 represents Touch-based interactions with dashed lines, and work on ubicomp iconography uses the dashed line to represent borders, or seams.

I’ve had trouble justifying my excitement about this intricate visual detail, so I thought it would be good to collect a bunch of examples from over fifty years of information design history, to show it as a powerful visual element in ubicomp situations.

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